The Commons' public administration committee has lambasted the government's record on delivering major IT projects. As others have done before, it argues that projects are too big, too long, and too divorced from policy; and that they pit ill informed civil servants against an "oligopoly" of large IT suppliers to disastrous effect.

In this light, it is perhaps unfortunate that the NHS is planning to do without an IT directorate at either the Department of Health or the new NHS Commissioning Board; although the board will have a second tier national director looking after patient engagement, insight and informatics.

Meanwhile, the Common's public accounts committee has announced that it will publish its report on the National Audit Office's report on the National Programme for IT in the NHS over the summer. The report could affect CSC's chances of getting a new deal for the North, Midlands and East of England, where it has missed a series of deadlines to deliver Lorenzo to trusts.

Yet it also emerged this week that the most high profile of those Lorenzo deployments, at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust, may be coming good. An update to the board last week simply said "it works!" and much more functionality is planned.

Steve Fairclough, IT director at Morecambe Bay, delivers his key message about Lorenzo to the board.

Diary

News of a creative health use for legacy technology reaches us via the website of the Cotswold Journal, where "a red phone box has become the first in the country to be fitted with defibrillation equipment that could help save the lives of cardiac arrest victims."

BT has agreed to pay to put the equipment in five of its old phone boxes that have been adopted by their local communities, and the village of Lower Slaughter is the first to take delivery. It's also the 1,500th village to adopt its phone box. Others have been turned into information centres, libraries and even art exhibitions.